For your questions on the resurrected body, have a read of The Spiritual Was More Substantial Than the Material for the Ancients.
For your questions on Jesus's death and sacrifice, you definitely want to read On the Incarnation.
Feel free to ask more questions here, but yes, the death of Jesus is understood to rid humankind of the curse of death.
See Daniel Boyarin's Gospel of the Memra and Alan Segal's Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism.